Kitty: Why does Alacritty terminal gets more attention than Kitty?

[horta]

Kitty is super fast. Very stable. Well maintained. Provide the minimal features (split screen, tabs) for a fully working terminal (no need to add another indirection layer, like tmux, that will add complexity to your workflow, or hope that your OS have a window manager that will fill the features gap left by Alacritty).

I understand the point of Alacritty, their reasons, and it is a great terminal but it seems that Kitty has all of Alacritty's strenghts plus do not lack the minimal set of features to make it a fully working terminal out-of-the-box.

[SolitudeSF]

it doesnt have rust circlejerk

[kovidgoyal]

Well, go out and spread the word :)

[Luflosi]

Alacritty runs on Windows and is the default terminal emulator on Sway.

[kovidgoyal]

Closing as not really a bug, but feel free to continue the discussion.

[ctrlcctrlv]

Alacritty is a gimmick TE. That's why. Its authors are good at marketing. Its main gimmick is its alleged speed. Meanwhile we're really trying to build a terminal emulator useful for most people, we don't need to make ridiculous claims, which, if true, are only so due to severe lack of useful features.

I wrote a blog post a while ago about why I don't like Alacritty or indeed most of the Rust ecosystem: https://gist.github.com/ctrlcctrlv/978b3ee4f55d4b4ec415a985e01cb1c9

[kovidgoyal]

And here we have some hardware based measurements showing kitty's latency is optimal, and much better than alacritty's (35ms vs 50ms): https://thume.ca/2020/05/20/making-a-latency-tester/

And to make it even better, I am guessing these tests were done with kitty's default settings which deliberately introduce a few ms of latency in the loop, to save energy. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance.html

[ctrlcctrlv]

That doesn't surprise me at all @kovidgoyal. The Alacritty devs have a very lopsided idea of what kind of speed even matters. They think it's just CPU operations...lol.

[pentago]

To those who land on this discussion..
The main difference today (Oct 2020) is:
Kitty doesn't work on MacOS High Sierra (perhaps even some builds up) while Allacrity does.

https://i.imgur.com/A3oICfi.png

[ctrlcctrlv]

@pentago start a new issue.

[Luflosi]

This is actually known: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2783.
Apparently the notarisation broke it though there is probably a workaround that we haven't figured out.

[pentago]

@ctrlcctrlv no need for new issue, I'm happy Alacritty user as compared to Kitty, it works on my antique of an OS.

[ctrlcctrlv]

So you're just here to troll then and not improve Kitty?

[CaninoDev]

Kitty is super fast. Very stable. Well maintained. Provide the minimal features (split screen, tabs) for a fully working terminal (no need to add another indirection layer, like tmux, that will add complexity to your workflow, or hope that your OS have a window manager that will fill the features gap left by Alacritty).

I understand the point of Alacritty, their reasons, and it is a great terminal but it seems that Kitty has all of Alacritty's strenghts plus do not lack the minimal set of features to make it a fully working terminal out-of-the-box.

Where tmux really shines is persistence across sessions (whether remotely or locally). Its ability to manipulate windows and panes is not what draws most people to it.

[Penguin-Guru]

Weighing in as a person who was just faced with the decision, I chose Alacritty because:

1. It was much better maintained in my distribution's repository-- was more current, had a couple less bugs, had less serious bugs, and was packaged to be more modular.
2. It didn't depend on as many other packages.
3. Kitty's features do seem great but the emphasis on packing multiple sub-terminals into a single window is redundant since I already use i3/sway for that.

Sorry if this seems overly critical. I definitely would have chosen Kitty if not for those. Still open to trying it in the future.

[kenranunderscore]

I have a couple of points to add that I haven't seen yet:

• I use macOS at work and NixOS or some other GNU/Linux variant at home. Ideally, I'd like to use the "same" terminal emulator on both system, with as few differences in configuration as possible. On paper, both kitty and alacritty would be good candidates. But alacritty has one big flaw (there's a huge issue open for it, but nothing really going on): it does not work correctly when using an alternative (manually created) keyboard layout on macOS; there's something wrong with the underlying library that manages the input, because it seems to react to the correct scancode, but not keycode. kitty has no such problems on any system that I've tried it on.
• The font rendering seems to be so much better in kitty. Again, on a Linux system this is not as noticeable, but on macOS I have to choose way lighter font variants in alacritty.

So for anyone else that's on the fence and happens to like tinkering with keyboard layouts on macOS: kitty is your go-to terminal emulator!

I don't even use many of kitty's features, like multiple windows or tabs. Maybe that is why I've yet to run into any problems with it.